It’s been about four months since I first installed Snow Leopard Server, all in all I’m quite impressed. One thing that I found a great improvement over Leopard Server was that the mod_perl module was compiled properly to run on the server with no further changes required.

Enabling mod_perl

1. 1.Click on the Web service
   

2. 2.Click on Settings
   

3. 3.Open Server Admin and connect to the Snow Leopard Server
   

4. 4.Click on the modules tab
   

5. 5.Click the + at the bottom of the module list and enter the following
   

6. •Module Name: perl_module
   

7. •Enabled [Checked]
   

8. •Module Path: libexec/apache2/mod_perl.so
   

6. 6.Click OK
   

7. 7.Click Save
   

mod_perl is now enabled and you can add your desired configuration to the site configuration files.

Using mod_perl

In /etc/apache2/sites you’ll find your website configuration files.

Edit the appropriate file for the site you want to enable mod_perl for and enter your configuration which will be along the lines of.

<IfModule mod_perl.c>

PerlRequire /Users/<MyUsername>/Library/Perl/startup.pl

<Location "/Somewhere">

SetHandler perl-script

PerlHandler MyModule

</Location>

</IfModule>

In startup.pl enter your standard mod_perl start up configuration.

This may look something like this.

#!/usr/bin/perl

####################

# Description:  mod_perl startup script to pre-load perl

#               modules that will used when running the

#               web servers perl modules

#

####################

# Standard Modules

use strict;

# Custom Modules

use lib "/Users/<MyUsername>/Library/Perl";

use MyModule;

####################

# Do some processing

1;

In the site configuration and startup.pl you’ll note that I’ve put my Perl code in my home directory under Library/Perl. This could be anywhere of course. If your server will host websites for many users that will each be setting up / developing / using their own mod_perl modules then you quite possibly don’t want to do this as you give each user with mod_perl essentially root access the server.

In my case, I’m in complete control of the modules and don’t see this configuration to present an unacceptable security risk.